A documentary by Barbara Hammer
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
With the new acceptance of documentary as both vital and entertaining and with box office receipts supporting commercial theatrical releases more and more there is still something missing. What? The emergence of daring work that resifts and questions the literal composition of homogenous “reality”. There are new ways to tell stories and audiences are hungry for creative and fresh approaches.
As a completely free and independent film artist I accept the challenge to expand the genre into multi-faceted motions of truths always giving the viewer credit for intelligence and perception. I work with the material that I find and create to make the most innovative piece possible. As an artist I can’t nor do I wish to follow a formula. Everything must be created new and each new subject given its own documentary performance, a film performance called forth by the found material itself.
When I was working on Resisting Paradise, my 2003 documentary that questions what artists do during a time of war and focus on artists and resisters of WWII who worked near Cassis, France, I tried to find a lesbian or gay man who was also a resister. As a lesbian filmmaker and an as an artist, I wanted to find a lesbian resister. People told me that during the war one didn’t think about sexual preference, but only about saving lives. I remembered coming across the photographs of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore at Hotel Sully in Paris in 1988, but since my film was centered on Cassis and the Mediterranean coast, I couldn’t include them. However, I could focus on their artistic lives and heroic, incredible acts of creative resistance to the Nazi occupation of Jersey Isle during WWII in my next film, LOVER OTHER.
It has been a privilege to work with the archival photographs, writings and graphic illustrations of these two women. I have found making the film challenging. A story of two Surrealist artists should not be told in strictly linear fashion, as that style would destroy the aesthetics of Surrealism. But the film needs to be accessible to an audience or it wouldn’t be seen. This has been both my struggle and delight during the two years of making LOVER OTHER.
Barbara Hammer
New York, New York
September, 2005